Went with the cordless phone out to the mud room, which is freezing cold, to sit in the old couch and talk by long-distance to the nice lady at “Iowa Cremation,” to make the arrangements beforehand for my mother. This is advised by the nurses at Crestview. The price, $1675, includes death certificate, medical examiner’s certification, complimentary disposable container, and pre-pays the USPS shipment of cremains to any address in the continental USA. All around the mud room stove is litter of ribbons and wrappings, tissue and salutations from Santa. Dog pee on the square stones of the floor. I can hear laughter from the kitchen, where visiting cousins drink beer with Hunter.

* * * *

Christmas Night. Hush. Old farmhouse sleeps a lot of people. My favorite things on the table: Brett’s braided bread, spinach salad and goat cheese, and Aleksandra’s mushroom soup (with wild mushrooms that were gathered in her village and mailed by her mother).

Nights, my chest pain is present, and I lie awake on my back. (Touring websites, all the prognoses in the world are discoverable by restless hypochondriac). Calling a doctor would not only make a bore of people’s Christmastime, it would also, inevitably, involve expensive tests. So I lie on my back thinking what message I would pass on to Hunter if.

I’d really only tell him that he already possesses all time and space. And that he already has faith, whether he knows it or not, and yet will never know what faith is. [Such thinking makes sense only at eschatological moments]

My preference is: chest pains are only indigestion and bad posture. This particular heart attack is just a nerve-pinch of thoracic vertebrae. (Plus, a Yuletide visit from the metaphysical, rattling its long chains).

It will vanish next week when I stop eating Stilton, and beef, and fudge under its round metal lid.

* * * *

Nice account from an email (names changed to protect the eminent):

“I just spoke to him. He asked what was possible. I said same arrangement

as last year. He said, I see. (Pause). And what was the money last year?

I don’t seem to recall. And I said, I’ll check with Alicia, but I think it

must have been $3500. And he said, $3500, I see. (Pause). And I said,

Maybe we can do better. I’ll have to check. And he said, That would be

helpful, and, let’s see, there is the matter of a car. And I said, Oh,

yes, a car. Well, you had a car last year, so I assume you would have one

this ear, but I’ll have to check. I could also drive you, if you’d prefer

that. And he said, A car would be nice. And the airfare, that would be

what class? And I said, Carl, we would love you to come. I’ll see how

much money we have and get back to you.

So–this may be the last go. Is it possible to give him $5000, a car,

and business class or first class travel? I would yield $1000 of my

honorarium for that purpose. Would be a way of saying thanks.”

* * * *

Xmas is coming. The shiver of K-Mart polyethylene in the back of the minivan. The desk-calendar in the kitchen is illegibly crowded. The weather has halted all painting on the south wall. At least all the priming is done. The Community of Writers bank accounts are empty, and the printers didn’t get us our thousand begging-for-money postcards in good time, so the whole bulk mailing plan may have to be scrubbed, according to Brett. The transfer of rescue money went awry in the bank. The deep-freeze weather is “spalling” my brick patio, popping chips off the top surface as big as scabs or (once or twice) as big as cookies. The chandelier is still on the coffee table. The roll of duct tape – which this morning was useful in mending Dashiell’s sneakers for school, while his carpool-ride waited out at the road – has fallen into the remote cat-box diarrhea [and for an instant I actually contemplate whether to rescue it and frugally wash it, and then do nothing about it, and move on]. Then Brett has to go to the bank. But she is in a panic because the necessary document (containing routing numbers, etc., to get us out of our financial tangle) can’t be found. “Here it is,” she says. “Under the tortilla.”

* * * *

Average Critical-Thinking Skills:

A) Folks who throw religion away, citing the Spanish Inquisition and Islamic terrorism. Or citing scandals like the popes’ forbidding birth control or the Jewish settlers’ impoliteness about territorial rights.

(If you want to watch yourself erase a “god,” first chalk up on the blackboard an old bearded human male on a cloud peering down at earth watching out for forbidden sex-acts.)

B) Our Complacent Pacifism. In San Francisco at the semi-regular “symposium” (where mostly the wine, not the philosophy, is featured), one old guy at the table raises his countenance and announces the old conclusive piety, “Well, the fact is, no war has ever accomplished any good.” And around the table, all the guys hang their heads in assent. I sit there thinking of a few wars: the American Civil War, which got a start in accomplishing one of the hardest improvements in the history of mankind; and of the Nazi concentration camps that were opened in WW II (a personal friend of mine, an elderly gent now, was a sergeant who walked up to the gate at Matthausen and lifted the hasp on that padlock while people watched from within in total silence); and the American Revoltionary War, which even the English seem to have oddly countenanced, and not fought with much ardor, maybe looking on with a certain kind of avuncular interest almost, ambivalently, at the ambitions of the new people. A “war” is a paroxysm.

* * * *

[The wars I’ve seen in my own time do seem to have been ignoble; but they have brought megasoline and prosperity, and rattan furniture made by simpler people. Here I sit, implicated in that.]

* * * *

Patience, patience. Last week I ran into yet another agent who is chagrined by certain of her famous client’s writing. Client has a huge reputation with young hip readers. Voice of a Generation, etc. Agent doesn’t even read the manuscripts in full when they come in, says she finds them boring and pretentious, and she just moves them on – as with a pitchfork – to a publishing-house editor; and presumably the editor in turn moves the manuscript on, pitchfork-style to the printers. A number of the highest-reputed writers seem to be treated this way in NY. Often traces of shoddy editing. All this in turn perhaps invites a reader (a readership) that isn’t reading closely or lovingly. This is a strange atmosphere to be working in, but I think it’s always been thus, in the book business, maybe since Gutenberg. Always a strange atmosphere to work in.

* * * *

December 9, 2010

Back in Nevada City. Back in my uncomfortable sweaty mucking boots. Behind the house the light is failing fast, dark at 4:30pm, while I split kindling to replenish the mud room woodbox. At such a time, the most luminous object in the universe is the garage wall, in the meadow beside me, old clapboard, painted last summer from a paint-bucket labeled “Brilliant White, Low Lustre.” (White, at the moment, is blue.)

Last week I was at harvest party in Marin, and during a break I was talking to a, maybe, thirty-year-old hedge fund manager who perhaps didn’t belong at that party, standing all by himself in an Italian-looking suit, leaning on a guyline cable that supported a tent. He had drunk too much wine and was feeling discursive. His girlfriend was sitting with her friends at a table, and for a while he and I waxed philosophical in conversation, and waxed geopolitical, and waxed socioeconomic, all in about ten minutes.

From his vantage point as an investor, “Everything’s pretty much shit-fucked out there.” He meant the economy and the global problematique, though at that moment he was looking out over Nan McEvoy’s pretty new groves of young olive trees multiplying over the hills of Marin. He swirled the red wine in his glass. “I’m about ninety percent in commodities, I’m in copper, oil futures, lithium and zinc and shit, and gold. Gold, gold, gold,” he spoke with distaste for gold. “Everything’s going shit-fucked. We’re not facing the population thing, and we’re not facing the global-warming thing. The food thing. This is what I tell people in my letter, too.” (He publishes a bulletin of investment advice, expensive to subscribe to.) He again swirled his wine in his glass and almost took a sip, but an ankle buckled, so he got a better grip on his slanting tent-line in the sunset. This is a guy who went to Harvard and Wharton and devised a certain kind of dream-life for himself in California – the German sports car, the bunker on Nob Hill from which to publish his financial letter, the girlfriend, the ski lease. Now I here I am back home in the blue twilight at end of day, clatter of cedar kindling, and I wonder, was he only saying the kinds of things he thinks I’m used to hearing? Or prefer to hear? Because I live in the country? He can’t sincerely believe what he was saying, can he? Is it possible he got back to Nob Hill from Marin with his girlfriend (car goes in underground garage) and went back to his routine telling people to invest in Duke Energy and Chinese Internet start-ups? Yes.

* * * *

Dec 1st

Beautiful day. Home from travels. Tired. Garbage and recycling are out at the road. Dry firewood is in. A warm storm will be coming up the slope, a weather system arising in a warm long South Pacific fetch (meteorologists’ term) rather than Gulf of Alaska .

Ignored work and, instead, answered misc old emails, wrote the begging-donations letter for Squaw, assembled the new elecrical generator out-of-the-box, raked the lane to keep sodden leaves from killing turf, wrote and sent four letters of recommendation. Dinner of sausage and potatoes. (This is the day the Lord made, exult the faithful and they’re right.)

* * * *

* * * *

Piety: If you count any event as unfortunate, or unpropitious, or a setback, you’re not “loving the Lord your God.”

(You could never have suggested to Nietzsche that his amor fati was the same flavor as Judeo-Xianity or Buddhism’s Third Noble Truth.)

* * * *

Amazing success in butternut squash this year, in a new-cultivated patch by Barbara’s cottage. Tough-stemmed vines roam the edges of the pavement and get a grip on Barbara’s old walker in the sun.

* * * *

The first harbinger: They adopt the British spelling “Neighbourhood” for their mall.

Second harbinger: At the valley entrance, the Olympic eternal-torch shrine from 1960 (sooty dirty-gold oil-flame flapping in the night beneath the statuary five-rings Olympic device) is now outshone by a towering white fluorescent-luminous rectangle, big enough to advertise a Wal-Mart, proclaiming “Celebrating Our Olympic Heritage!”

* * * *

November 26

Bought a generator at last. $700. I’m ashamed of expenditure, but the power outages are irksome and make for inefficiency, and with Barbara here in delicate, declining health, we have to be responsible.

* * * *

First good storm of the season, 11-23-2010. In two days, there’s four feet of powdery snow. Then after a few hours’ break, two more feet are added on top. We arrive and I have to swim through this to get to the shovels stowed under the deck. And then use the shovel to make a channel to the woodpile.

I’m reminded of Paul Radin, the wild “Jewish Indian” who lived in these hills all his life, mistrustfully and shyly, wearing the same greasy brimmed hat in all seasons, a frail-looking figure, Bob Dylanesque in heeled boots, to be glimpsed sometimes walking on Highway 89. Bear-claw and chamois pouch of “medicine” tied at his throat. Paul in wintertime used to keep a rope strung between his house and his barn, so he could make his way out to feed his horse during blizzard conditions. And not get lost in the forty-foot gap. Out at Ramparts, where the cold came fast.

In summertime Paul used to ride that horse over the mountain to visit the Writers Conference. And insist on reading his shamanistic poetry, hijacking the Follies stage, mistaking the audience’s derision for warm encouragement, going on and on, until beautiful Sands had the inspiration of coming onstage and embracing him to get him off.

Name of that horse: . . . ? . . . Zumgali!

Horse died. Died a couple of years before Paul himself died. He buried it directly before his cabin, shallowly, amounting to a big mound there. I was one of the few who ever went out there. He used to sit before the mound smoking in the evenings. Ornamented the mound with rings of stones. Eventually he took to sleeping beside the grave, nights. Then a bear moved into his house and displaced him. This went on for the last year of his life. If ever he wanted to go into his house to get something – a poem or a book or a cooking pan – he first gave a blast of his loud air-horn to scare the bear. The bear would pour out the back-side and go irritably up the slope (I was there to see this happen, once); and Paul , on the front side, would pry back the loose plywood and go in.

In his dying days, Andrew Tonkovich and I used to bring him marijuana that we could scare up from some friends, as a balm for his cancer. He would sit by the horse-mound and smoke, his little air-horn alarm at his side, in all weathers. Propane space-heaters in the outdoors. Sitting between two propane space-heaters. After he died, we explored the cabin and found that the bear over the months had pretty much leveled everything to knee-high rubble: Paul’s bedding and furniture and cookware, and loose sheaves of poetry and books, all tossing together to make a bear’s-nest. Now his brother the Boston banker will be trying to develop Paul’s property. Putting condos by the river.

* * * *

Thanksgiving. In the tall snowbank outside the window, bottlenecks stick up in a row, Two-Buck-Chuck pinot grigiot, chilling there. Henrik and Barbara are reportedly stranded on the summit, held back by a CHP road-closure in the blizzard, in their backseat twenty pounds of cracked crab from the North Beach wharves. Cavendish does arrive, in a hazardous truck because it lacks heat. Lacking heat is a privation which, ordinarily, he wouldn’t mind; after all, he’s got a scarf and gloves; but the problem is, moisture condenses on the inner windshield, then freezes to a glaze of opaque ice.

Cavendish has brought Cassy, the Nevada City poet laureate. She is the feckless attractive artist whose car broke down permanently, and who therefore began borrowing friends’ cars, eventually to take up sleeping in them, upon being evicted from the apartment she’d stopped making rent-payments on. She arrives looking beautiful.

Various tables are lined up, and candles located. The lace tablecloth must be withdrawn from archives and spread out. The old oil painting of Brett, nude, must be stashed in a closet. When the Bulls do arrive, they have a Norwegian method of cleaning the white flokati rug from before the fireplace: spread it face-down over a snowdrift, and whack at it with a broom handle: you really do leave a grey rectangle.

The table is at last seated, all the usuals, with no one excluded, always a few new faces, a couple of bluegrass musicians, one cancer-victim on short lease, still wearing hospital bracelet and hospital smock, one visiting software-designer’s family, Cavendish and Cassy and others, the several older folks with their prescription pill bottles amber-plastic and child-proof. Outside, in the rest of the world, North Korea has begun shelling South Korea, Haitians are getting cholera post-earthquake, the Israeli Knesset has just voted never to give back any of their settlement areas in the West Bank, and Washington is gridlocked, and somewhere a glacier is shrinking. How apocalyptic is every instant.

Clink glasses. Nobody will “say grace,” as this crowd is too agnostic. But Cassy has a fresh substitute: she will sing the Kiowa Death Song. (The reasoning, of course, is that Thanksgiving commemorates the decimation of Native Americans.) So, while all others’ eyes respectfully fall, Cassy lifts her face and belts it out in a very convincing Indian style, Hey-Yuh Hey-yay-yay-Yuh, with yips and shouts and sobs. It goes on forever. I catch Dashiell’s eye, and the merriment there is so contagious, I have to bow over my plate, taking deep slow breaths.

* * * *

Original meaning. “Charisma” in Greek-language X-ian philsophy was simply a “talent.” A charisma was a gift of God, to be put to use.

In contemporary usage “charisma” is a technique of seduction and self-aggrandizement.

November 23, 2010. In Squaw by myself, putting the cabin away for the winter. All alone here with the romance of the big fireplace, I miss my family’s alarms and melodrama and wit. An old paperback of The Sickness Unto Death has been dislodged from a bookshelf, and I’m gladdened, to greet again that miserable old Dane.

So I’ve thought of rereading it tonight, with the “highly intellectual” project of, maybe, discovering likenesses between Buddhist dukkha doctrine and the Dane’s painstaking analysis of despair (which I recall to be as detailed as the dharma).
Stop with the red wine at eight. But then I discover that, because tonight I’m granting myself the rare medicine of a Unisom gel-tab, as I settle down with my book before the fire, I’m really looking forward most to the sleeping pill. Like I’m dropping acid: a sleeping pill is the big event of the evening. Not the whitewater rapids of Kierkegaard. Not at all.

* * * *

(November. Dumped-on by early snow, at 6000-foot elevation.)

Dash will be 10 yrs old soon, and today he went out alone carrying a few paper dollars he’d earned, to walk all the way, by himself, to the store to buy a toy with his own money. After two days of snow, the sky dawned clear and a summery sun has melted all the snow on the roads, which are now shining-wet in the warm air. He has been given his mother’s cell phone, lodged deep in his jeans pocket, and been instructed to call home when he arrives at the store. He has been warned to stay far to the side of the road “if a car comes.” And he’s dressed warmly. All around him, as he walks alone by himself, the world will be shining as it only does in mornings of fast snowmelt and blue sky. Pine boughs will be dropping their ladlefuls of white.

* * * *

Clear sky all night. Stars are pebbles at the floor of the stream. Before sunrise, on the high old-snow places (Squaw Peak, Granite Chief, KT-22) snowcaps come up as violet first. Then peach.

* * * *

November 17, 2010
Tracy arrives in Nevada City with elk in her luggage, frozen hunk.
(epicurious.com counsels disguising it with sauces; fatiguing it by many hours in slow-cooker.)
The misery of the hunter. Tracy says the guy who shot it and, miles from his truck, knelt before the carcass with his knife for the winter afternoon’s work, got himself a hernia in the long process of dressing it.

* * * *

[I’m getting the sense there’s a white-trash aristocracy in this: ALL of my male friends up here seem to have had at least one hernia operation.]

* * * *

Fantasy: The entire American population adds woolly socks and dumpy sweatshirts to their bedtime costume. The immediate result: 11,000 hectares of rainforest per year are saved.

* * * *

…For the high and the next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet.
–The Cloud of Unknowing, 14th C.

* * * *

Far out Newtown Road, there’s always been a big hand-lettered sign:

For Sale, 32-plus Acres
Three Buildings On Four Separate Parcels
Well and Creek
OLD MAN READY TO DEAL

Don’t enjoy movies just now. Can’t sit through them. My boys over the years got accustomed to being disappointed with their dad, in this way.

A longed-for movie is rented, the mud room stove is stoked up, maybe even popcorn is popped – all settle in – and soon (this usually happens around the first plot point, where what’s-at-stake is being declared) – soon Dad is climbing out of his prized comfy chair. Slipping away. To go read a book. (I could sit through an entire movie if I were to drink red wine steadily the whole time and kill off a whole half-bottle.)

Well, dad just likes the establishing shots.
I take it as a general principle that, as an organism, I’m like an apple on a tree, fulfilling my appleness in good order without my own having to fret about it too much. So when I find I’m too impatient even to sit through a movie, and take no interest in any of the inside-industry or outside-industry products – or even pictures my own friends have somehow gotten made, even artistic small celebrated pictures – I assume that it’s in my nature at present. I’m seeing everything as beside-the-point. So who knows. Maybe it is.

* * * *

Nov. 14 –

A joke from a sermon: “The sin of ‘evil speech’ is the one sin you could do all the live-long day and never get tired.”

(As a novelist well knows.)

For a novelist, the delight of evil speech is vocation. Practiced indeed all the live-long day.

* * * *

Nov. 12

“Advice,” for a writer, is abundant. Especially from those closest to you. Urging success.

I’d rather drink muddy water / And sleep in a hollow log.

* * * *

Nov. 7

Week-end. After way too many hot, dry days, a winter-style rain is coming. Brett has been up in Squaw alone – hemming curtains, re-covering couch cushions – stays in touch by phone to get my interpretations of the NOAA weather predictions for snow up there. On my prompting, she makes the trip back down here just in time, before the storm arrives and they close the pass. As she comes over the summit, the Highway Patrol at Truckee is beginning to set up the orange cones, to start turning people back.

Here, Barbara and I have been making sure we take our pills, watching British-produced situation comedies on TV, getting the laundry in before the onset of rain.

* * * *

You can write to advance a notion, you can write to be admitted to a “canon” of “literature,” you can write to revenge yourself against your parents or schoolmasters, you can write to please the judges of big prizes, you can write for the critics’ approval, or for academics’.

But can your work withstand the scrutiny of a reader’s love. I don’t mean adulation. (Which does not look so closely.) Or even respect. I mean the reader’s love.

* * * *

Our friend the piano teacher, whom I see around town, has emotion welling in her eyes at all times. I run into her by the dairy case (the yogurt, the cottage cheese, the artificial creamer). She’s a pretty woman of about 65 or 70. Freckles. Grey hair in braids. In a two-minute chat, I make her tear up sentimentally in various ways. “How’s Barbara?” she says, “I’ve been meaning to visit.”

I tell her Barbara keeps getting younger – (not kidding: it’s not exactly untrue) – that because of her diet or just her natural recovery from stroke, she’s getting younger every day.

This makes happy damp shine in her eyes, under IGA’s fluorescent dispensation. (It’s as if everybody is this woman’s own personal family and she’s getting news of them posthumously in the Afterlife.) “How’s Hunter?”

Oh, he’s great. He’s so busy with his studies, we don’t hear much from him. He’s living right in the middle of Amherst (her husband’s alma mater is Amherst) – got a girlfriend – studying Greek playwrights, physics – and all the maples on the quad are changing color.

That last detail especially makes her eyes brim. As I half-knew it would! So I think I ought to let up on her, change the subject. Do a little healthy griping. About the abandoned septic tank I had to unearth and nobody would help. Easy thing to gripe about. Nothing poignant about it.

* * * *

In fact, though, Barbara isn’t that simple. She’is still speaking very little. At meals only very quietly.

Tonight, post-Halloween, Dash brings his entire pillowcase of candy to the table after dinner and dumps it out in candlelight — to sort it, to spread it out, to fondle. I kid him (“The Life of Buddha” used to be a bedtime story), telling him while he gloats over his candy, “Remember what the Buddha said: Desire causes Suffering. Suffering can be overcome by overcoming desire.” Barbara perks up, grins in relief and hoists her glass to mine and says, “I’ll drink to that.”

* * * *

(Mu-shu-pork lunch special at Fred’s on Broad Street)

I tell my friend the Episcopal minister that, it seems to me, anyone who takes an ‘inordinate’ interest in religion has ‘something pretty basically, deeply wrong with him.’ It’s surely an imprecise and misstated idea, regrettable to blurt out in vague half-baked condition.

But in pleasure he puts down his chopsticks: “Exactly!” (This from a graduate of the seminary.) In his wink, leering fraternity: I’d just veered near, yes indeed, the nice, awful, little secret.

On the meadow are heaped tomato vines. Brett has cleared and raked the enclosed garden. Scoured of stubble and stalks, the soil is bare, a sight which always pained me. Those and blackberry cuttings must all be carted off into the woods somewhere.

* * * *

Oct. 30. Saturday. Quiet and Sunny. Dash will instruct Aleksandra this afternoon in the art and method of pumpkin carving, so tonight (out on this road where no one will see them anyway) we’ll have three Jack-O’-Lanterns flickering tonight, one for Nico, one for Aleksandra, and one for Dash.

* * * *

October 27, 2010

Started sunny. Got colder and darker all day.

Put up all storm windows.

Dug leaf-detritus out of all gutters and downspouts.

Covered and drained swamp-coolers at our house and at Barbara’s.

Cavendish is still sleeping here, living in the playroom, peeing into a strainer, expecting crystals to come forth in his pee. (Boasting post-operation that he will produce a small dune of crystals.) Tonight is the first game of the World Series, and because the SFO Giants are to compete, the event is important around here. Cavendish’s laptop, while I cook, is on the kitchen table competing with candlelight, bringing in the pictures of the game, and he exults over base hits. Giants are taking the lead and holding it. Chili is on the stove. Barbara stays away from loud baseball, in her own cottage with the PBS “NewsHour” and her stemmed glass of non-alcoholic white wine.

* * * *

Re: The “God’ whose existence is affirmed below:

It’s not much of an affirmation. To affirm the existence of any divinity that might be visible to the rational faculty involves subtracting, from it, all its qualities. The thing exists only in its unknowability, and is affirmable only to the extent that it stays invisible. As a proof, it’s like saying “Existence implies existence.” Or, “Look! Zero equals zero! And one equals one!” Such a diviinity is like an algebraic placeholder.

Subtracting “God” thus (as an unnecessary unknowable), the only left-over quantity is that odd emotional addition, the “love” motive of Creation. The rational part self-cancels. And the only remainder is the irrational afterthought. The anthropomorphism. The mythological. The “caring.”

In the metaphysician’s lab, after the explosive poof, the retorts and beakers are suddenly empty and sparkling-dry. But there’s a scent in the air.

* * * *

October 27, 2010

Sharp october sunlight. It’s 9:55 AM. I’m waiting for the morning frost to thaw on the slopes of shingles, so I can climb up there with heavy storm windows.

The most interesting news recently, meanwhile, is that a galaxy from 13.4 billion years ago has been photographed by Hubble. 13.4 billion was almost the “beginning of time.” The blurred pinpoint-fleck of orange light, as reproduced in the NY Times, is a signal from the early period when light itself hadn’t existed long. Those photons started their journey 0.5 B after “big bang,” so they’re bringing an eschatological minute right back here for our inspection. In the photograph it appears as faint, red-shifted, and it’s upstaged by newer closer stars, but it’s still out there, hanging out where the Big Bang continues as a present-time event.

This universe’s Big Bang of course wasn’t necessarily the first thing. So say cosmologists. A singular, unique “Big Bang” is a suggestion we favor, as “our” special origin story (particularly we in the West, far from the Upanishads). The scientific likelihood is that before our own little “Big Bang” there were bazillions of Big Bangs over trillions of Kalpas.

I do continue to be interested in “Rational Proofs” of God’s Existence (cherishing particularly St. Anselm’s so-called ontological proof, for its clever gimcrack fake-out abracadabra.) There’s one obvious logical problem in positing a “God” as an ultimate First Cause. It’s a problem of “infinite regress”: What preceded Him, or created Him? What were the prior sufficient conditions for the existence of a “divinity”?

Nevertheless, a kind of ultimate theism seems necessary, because, from all I see of cause-and-effect in the world, I infer that something initiated this endless cosmic inhalation and exhalation of fireworks. Something outside chronological time and causation. Surely it was a “something” never to be limned by myth nor by science nor even in the liveliest hallucination.

Yet, let me suggest furthermore that if something “caused” existence, then something “cared.” That additional bit of anthropomorphism seems inevitable. Something had to care. That’s how we must imagine events’ teleology. Oddly, this emotional (!) premise of “caring” seems even more axiomatic, more deeply, logically originary, than the cause-effect nexus. So it is that we are inclined, helplessly, to capitalize this Something. At the beginning of the “temporality” that provides the matrix of all subseqent epochs, a certain Something must have “cared,” “cared” to do something. Or had a “motive,” or an “impulse.”

On my five acres life, meanwhile, seems comprehensible. That a nutritional material is formed in chloroplasts from sunlight and soil; that it enters my mouth; that it sustains this trance I think of as objectivity, before exiting “my” body (me being, in this case, the 165-lb collation of cells that, during a period of a few decades, has foamed up temporarily and mostly held its shape), all these principles are treated routinely around here, with no special astonishment. My coffee in the morning. My red wine at the end of a day. My eyes’ thirst for color and distance. My absorption in lust/gluttony/envy/wrath/pride. My endless dissatisfaction. I see that “I” am an illusion, yes. But one thing seems clear. It seems clear that “I” wasn’t the thing doing the necessary caring back at the “beginning” of “time.”

* * * *

Beef stew: a bay leaf, shitake mushrooms, soy sauce, port, black pepper. Cavendish arrives, on the eve his big “lithotripsy” operation, to spend the night here. We have agreed to give him a six-am ride to the “Surgery Center,” a storefront in a mall. And pick him up afterward at ten-thirty groggy. As for the scab on forehead, he has no explanation.

“Oh, hey. Would you pick up my antibiotics prescription? Sorry. I spaced it.”

* * * *

Rewards of cultural exchange. Aleksandra (her family in Krakow made regular mushrooming expeditions, etc., smoked their own hams) informs us, helpfully, that our lavender, out back by the garage, can be brought indoors and scattered in the cupboards to deter the moths that infest the flour.

Reciprocally, she enters the kitchen this morning proclaiming, “Brett! I googled your shoes!” In fresh English of European speaker, the syntax pops

My worries are over, everyone got home safe to me. Brett and Barbara and Dash and the dog, all in a car arrive in heavy rainstorm, driving down from Squaw Valley on winding two-lane mountain highways in the wet dark, and I’ve got pesto and bockwurst and cauliflower, the windows all steamed up, and my anxiety over their routine imperilment (apron, ladle) housewifely. Only a few flakes of snow attacked their windshield coming over the summit. Dash with flashlight flickers in the meadow and woods, looking for the missing cat, the color high in his cheeks. Barbara by candlelight stalks the kitchen, looking for glass of wine, disgusted as usual by Garrison Keillor’s mellow “Prairie Home Companion” on the radio, a cane in each hand these days to support her.

* * * *

For subsequent use: A Jewish feminist agitates in favor of genital mutilation, clitoridal excision for herself and her entire sisterhood, as sign of covenant equivalent to (privileged males’) circumcision.

[With reprise of Texas psychopath who kidnaps, etherizes, and circumcises-and-releases folk, to save their souls.]

* * * *

Oct. 20.

Dry, sunny days are back for a while.

Aleksandra is living here, while Nico returns to SFO for construction labor.

All the furniture in the living room has been pushed up against the walls to make room for quilt manufacture. Muslin backing, then batting, then the quilt-face, are to be laid out in a large loose (term of art) “sandwich.” Then poke-stitching is to begin in the middle.

However, the batting material – the single great rectangular pad of it – was first fed into the washer, with the thought that it should be shrunken before being enclosed between two panels of cloth. Of course it broke up into a slurry, which in the spin cycle was pasted evenly in a cylinder against the inner walls of the washer tub, to be dug off by fingernails in scoops. Brett asked in despondency, “Do you still love me?”

* * * *

Sunday afternoon, arriving home, as I came around into the driveway, a red-tailed hawk flew low across my windshield danglilng in its talons a loopy snake. A weird sight.

Cavendish shows up around dinner time. He has some frozen “chicken pot pies” of his own and insists he’s only stopping by to pick up a package that arrived for him at this address and is driving out to his forest blind to heat his pies. (To power a microwave out there, I think extension cords run from old dormant building-site hookup. His trailer is just over the ridge from it).

But he is easy to persuade that my soup is preferable. Falls asleep at the table. Goes to bed in cottage.

* * * *

Nico and Aleksandra are back. Success in the Big City has eluded them, at least temporarily. Finding work and living-quarters is hard, in that (no longer so inclusive or forgiving) town. She will stay here in the playroom for a week or so, while Nico will drive back to SFO to work as a hod carrier in the construction of a strip-mall, sleeping nights in the Dodge van, subsisting on 7-Eleven provender. Both wear simple gold wedding rings.

* * * *

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Up at four. Work well.

By dawn, the first drops of rain.

Bring in patio furniture. Plug in the car (this old diesel business). Bring in summer-dry kindling from cedar split 2 or 3 yrs ago. Cover firewood with tarps. Clean up tools and materials of summer projects (the façade for Barbara’s porch overhang). Set up Barbara with coffee and Sunday paper. Dash is awake, watching TV in the mud room, with his hands clapped over his eyes, because the hero is about to kiss a girl: the two of them onscreen linger brushing slack lips, breathing into each other’s mouths. I offer Dash a wedge of pear, which cheerfully (“Sure, yeah!”) he accepts with his one free hand while keeping his eyes covered.

* * * *

October 16, 2010

Saturday. Rain is predicted for tomorrow.

Lit the pilot lights in wall heaters for winter

Refrained, yet, from putting up storm windows

Window-screens go into the garage

Tarped over the stacked wooden garden furniture

Tennis with Dashiell

* * * * * * * * * * * *

First thing this morning, I stepped on – and broke – the hourglass that has been rolling around the bathroom floor. These things come into Dashiell’s hands at school as gifts from oral-hygiene demonstrations (they set a child’s two-minute standard for how long you’re supposed to brush). It’s been rolling around underfoot for some days, and now the capsule is broken, and the dose of pink sand, two minutes’ worth, will be sifting into recesses in the bathroom floor, as I didn’t sweep it up.

The other epochal event today. I noticed that my temporary paper driver’s license calls my hair “gray.” It wasn’t me that changed the hair color record, I would have only reapplied routinely as “BRN, BRN, 5’10”, 165 lbs,” and in fact it still is mostly brown. The very friendly girl at the DMV counter must have changed it to gray, and without mentioning. She must accomplish this little kindness often, many times a day, because I’m sure most people, not out of vanity but just negligence or indifference, let their hair-color alone on official records. Also, the girl must make a custom of not mentioning it, as she makes the little change, there at the counter she occupies in the world, moving people on through the system.

* * * *

Sunday afternoon occupation. The big bookshelf culling here.

Three card tables in the garage support small towers of hardcovers and paperbacks –The Color Purple, Lattimore’s dog-eared Iliad.Light in August. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Field Geology. One small stack, on the right, is the keepers. The rest will go to the Eric’s bookstore in the coffee shop. The garage radio plays NPR.

* * * *

The man from the county comes for the periodic, routine test of the groundwater in the well. He’s only interested in the gallons-per-minute productivity, not e-coli or trace minerals like mercury or lead.

He kneels at the well-head in the pumphouse. He’s patient. Chats about the fish in Hirschman Pond. I see he’s got a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, but refrains from lighting one up to kill time. Anyway, the well tests out all right. Five gallons per minute. It’s fine. And he tastes from the tin cup. “Granite,” he says.

“Granite?”

“I don’t taste soil. Just granite.” And he explains.

This water is melted snow which has seeped through fissures in underground stone. This cupful melted about 500 years ago – long before radioactive fallout, or even soot – up around Big Bend, where the “Rainbow Lodge” exit now is, off I-80, at the five- or six-thousand-foot elevation, and then it spent some centuries seeping toward us.

And my first, reprehensible, craven thought is, how can we keep this water supply out of the hands of the coming hordes?

The opening sentence of the Dhammapada: “Mind precedes its objects. They are mind-governed and mind-made. To speak or act with a defiled mind is to draw pain after oneself, like a wheel behind the feet of the animal drawing it.”

* * * *

October 11 –

Spray for blackberries with heavy-duty OrthoMax solution. Only the north and east property lines, experimentally.

* * * *

October 10 –

Sunday. Apples. The crop is skimpy, but enough. Dash wearing old shoulder-strap bag of woven grass likes to climb high in the limbs and flouts all warnings from the ground. In the kitchen, the juicer makes its dynamo hum. Carafes of cider stand around, with grey sudsy foam.

* * * *

Oct. 7 –

Spread “MOLEMAX” pellets (castor oil) w/rotary broadcaster.

Broken garden chair: brass screwplate, clamp, epoxy.

Oven door: purchase cable, springs, cable ties.

* * * *

Oct. 7.

The apples this year are the best ever. Largely worm-free. So I realized something. This was the year I neglected to put out the pheromonal traps for coddling moths.

Of course. Those traps attract moths to the trees. They’re enticed by the sexy pheromone, then discover apples, for their eggs to dwell in.

* * * *

The Nature/Culture thing:

Seems like every time I pass thru the cottage, in the flickering blue light of a TV set, a crime drama is playing: a bad guy is being tracked down. And at the murder scene the camera is obsessively lingering over the corpse, relishing the little lake of blood. Or by flashing jump-cuts (thigh, throat, temple), the sense of a “forbidden glance” is provided upon corpse. Or the moment of the slaughter itself revolves in sick dreamy slo-mo. Or we’re in the morgue and the coroner is standing by a gurney with a cop (usually it’s a young woman cop; on these TV soundstages the lighting gaffers use the actress’s nipples as a reference to set the depth-of-focus on the cameras, which must be evidence of what matters centrally in this medium), and the coroner is lifting the naked corpse’s sheet and he winces, saying, “Sorry. Some things you just never get used to.”

I’m only the guy passing through the room, on my errands. These are channels aimed at a demographic called “women,” the ones who, if Atticus brings in the trophy of a dead vole, send me out to dispose of the little soft body.

* * * *

Cavendish shows up for dinner. He says a fine-looking furred mammal has been living with him in his trailer. It’s shy. Seldom seen. He has identified it as a ferret, by Internet research.

His news is, he will need an operation. His kidney stones, he says, are as big as olives. He’d always known he was kidney-stone-prone, and has passed several in his life so far. But these are too huge to pass. He says, “I’d always thought of myself as a crystal maker, now it turns out I’m giving birth to moons.”

* * * *

War on moles and gophers:

A) Castor-oil. They hate it. It repels them.

B) A product called “The Giant Destroyer.” It looks like a small stick of dynamite. You light the fuse, drop it in the burrow, and cover over the entrance. It releases a noxious gas.

* * * *

The oven door last night, revealing the roast, flopped down heavily with a clang.

A spring had snapped, and now the whole thing must be wired shut at the door-handle, to stay closed. Today, a new spring must be bought at the hardware store. This is a great old O’Keefe & Merritt, everything fixable, by any average-intelligence amateur who simply uses his powers of observation and a little fortitude. One side of the range is a skillet you can burn kindling in. We’ve never used it but it’s there to play its role in our Total-Environmental-Collapse schtick one day.

* * * *

6:30 AM, working in the basement of Barbara’s house in Squaw Valley, I can hear Tad’s voice droning overhead in Barbara’s bedroom. It sounds almost as if he’s reading aloud to her, at this hour of the morning.
Later I see Tad on the road and ask him what was happening. He says his mother had had a sleepless night – (her daughters are all out on highways driving to far places; she is alone at home with Tad) – and she asked him to come and tell her a story. So Tad pulled up a chair by her bed and launched into an hour-long redaction of the Wyatt Earp gang’s story, with Doc Holliday, the Clanton gang, the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral – and Wyatt Earp’s “incredibly dysfunctional family, the Earps” – and Wyatt Earp’s subsequent career in the West Coast movie business, where he became so wealthy he bought the entire town of Hollywood.

September 20, 2010.
At this time of year I can tell fall is coming by a new sound in the trees. I remember it from other winters. It’s a big ocean overhead, coming from the big slopes all around, a steady surf. It’s a sound you don’t get in the summertime here. Meteorologically, it’s probably the announcement of “the arctic low” dropping into the Gulf of Alaska. The paint on the southeast side of the house is peeling. Out back behind my trailer, in the upended pollen-dusted Sony cassette-player, wasps have built their nests, wealthy papery mound of hexagonal nurseries, inside the open jaw of the player deck. The tomatoes this year are ripening too slowly: it’s September and they’re still shiny-green.
Have replaced the old Volvo with a (even older) diesel-engine car, to be converted to biodiesel as non-corn fuel starts coming along: there’s a fellow out on the Ridge who is starting a business distributing vegetable fuel. He plans to offer a $3/gallon contract, to home-deliver fuel in drums, to be mounted on an angle-iron trestle here, so maybe I’ll have my own filling station beside the garage. A diesel vehicle turns out to be an inconvenient, tractor-like thing, which will take some getting used to. Different pace of life, even slower than ever.

August 18, 2010.
Back home in Nevada City, end of summer. The air is heavier down here than at the high elevations, more humid, and a mulch dogshit smell permeates the extremely cobwebby woods. The garden is late: tomatoes all unripe. Another “zilch” year for pears. Rodents have eaten through the line providing electricity to my trailer. (It’s just an orange 100-ft extension cord on the forest floor, originating in the pumphouse, which is the nearest juice.)

* * * *

The trailer under the oaks. The windows crank open against the strands of summer-spiders’ architecture. Those spiders now grown and gone. The heavy-metal space heater still works, making its strange (inexplicable!) elephant-trumpeting noise in waking up and electrocuting its toaster coils. The usual rodent pellets all over the desk and the trailer’s sink and the three-burner stovetop. Each birch-veneered drawer (I slide each open) is filled up with a mouse nest, so it’s like an apartment building. Which I just leave alone. I slide each drawer back in place. The little plastic tray of D-Con bait, heaped levelly with minty-green pellets, is at my elbow, as always. My fingertips are so calloused from handling my ten thousand old bricks, their touch won’t stimulate my laptop’s trackpad, which doesn’t recognize the electrostatic touch of my skin.

* * * *

September: Mowing largest meadow, I feel fat raindrops on my forearms, but I keep on mowing. The wind picks up. On hood of tractor, wet freckles evaporate fast, having appeared.

* * * *

Fall, 2010. Good to be back from Squaw, back in my trench. Hunter will be leaving soon for sophomore year, and Dash is back in school: fifth grade. I’m in my fifties now.
A month ago in July, Dash and I played miniature golf – at the same old place as ever, along a shabby Tahoe tourist-strip by the lake. Most cherished and dorkiest of mini-golf courses, the old green felt shrinking away from the cement channels, the girl dispensing scorecards and pencil stubs across her window-sill with open boxes of Baby Ruths and Butterfingers, its course’s plywood obstacles (Indian chiefs, clown-mouths, eightballs) hand-carpentered and hand-painted, or -varnished, by an old man in the 1950’s, unrenovated over a half-century.

An increasingly interesting reward of having had children: During this our brief hallucinatory witness among clouds of apparent particles endowed with “mass” and “energy,” in the midst of the ongoing, rumored Big Bang, if we have fostered biological children, then we have actually taken a dip into “matter.” We haven’t just groped spectrally through the particle-swarm for a few decades. We seem to have augmented the whole thing by a few pounds. It’s a sort of metaphysical event. Apparently, there will be consequences to our apparent existence, in the form of the continuity of the mystical thing flesh.

What made me think of this: the scorecard from eighteen holes of mini-golf (actually 36 holes; we went around twice) is still riding in my car’s door-pocket with suntan lotion and candy bar wrappers and a little replacement bulb for the dashboard display. The rainy snowy cold season will come, and there will be many pick-ups and drop-offs at school, and that paper scorecard will go on riding along indefinitely, the record of 36 holes outlasting me.

* * * *

Zen saying:

“Between the basin and the basin, I utter a lot of nonsense.”

[the two basins being: the basin the newborn infant is washed in, and the one the corpse of the very same being will be washed in]

* * * *

August 7, 2010.
Today’s the day. The 150 writers are due to arrive for the annual week of ambition, tuition, disappointment, romance, festivity. It’s dawn here in Calif. butmy people’s planes will already be in the air, and cars on the roads.
Woke up with the vibrant sensation of time’s sand-grains dwelling in my bones. How much of bullshit, I wonder, is in my feeling that everybody is already a “saint or at least mystic,” though unbeknownst. – [The Mormons do that thing of theirs: they make you be a “saint” right away, right when you join up, no kidding around.] [Like it comes with your certificate and your secret decoder ring and your T-shirt. You’re a saint, stop pretending you’re not.]
Coffee has already been brewed. In the Annex living room Brett and Lisa, the Executive Directors, are in long white nightgowns in dawn light. The scissoring hum, rising and falling, of the sewing machine on the dining room table. They are up early hemming broad swaths, to serve as tablecloths in workshops.

* * * *

2-8-10
Whatever all this is, none of us will ever have the slightest “understanding” of it, though we are in constant uninterrupted contact with all its voltage every instant. Fascinating predicament. Absolutely fascinating.
Coming up from the mailbox in the cold February sun. Lots of heavy, glossy magazines for Barbara. (Or for Barbara’s demographic):

LifeExtension Magazine: Is Your CoQ10 Obsolete?
Increase Mitochondrial Support with a Newly Formulated CoQ10 – Now with Shilajit!

On a telephone pole down the road, an unusual woodpecker (perhaps an intruding species) taps with a rapid rhythm accelerating the decomposition of that particular telephone pole.

* * * *
2-14-10
My anti-film-festivals crack. It’s not the festivals themselves, nor the movies. Movies are great. So are movie-makers. The problem is: what happens to the towns over subsequent years: Park City and Mill Valley were both once quiet lovable places. H’wood injects its virus. Twenty years later you’ve got the actual panthers and cheetahs of Rodeo Drive slinking in the very streets, or rather their imitators. People think that can’t happen here.

* * * *

Fruit of late-night conversation in the cottage, as endless boring luge competitions flicker on televised Olympics:
Everybody is willing to perk up and say, “Well, yes, ‘love’ as a Prime Mover, sure, I’ll go along with that. That’s my religion: God is love.”
Anybody is willing to say it. The god-is-love thing could even be considered “true,” if semantically risk-free. I.e., meaningless, in the sense of being non-referential. But how radical are the implications of the remark. Upward theological implications (suddenly you’re a mystic!) and downward practical (suddenly you’re a saint!).

* * * *

The town’s movie theatre.

It’s a storefront. Flat non-sloping floor. Armchairs. Charles has only one projector, so the reel-change requires a long intermission, including reel-rewind. Charles bakes brownies, something to serve to his patrons during the unavoidable break. We can all smell Charles’s brownies baking during Reel One. Then comes intermission. All stand around out front and eat his hot brownies, while Charles, behind his velvet curtain, rewinds the first reel and threads the leader of Reel Two into the sprockets.
Charles’s big interest, personally, is in short subjects. He is a connoisseur and archivist of cartoons, public-service spots, newsreels. So the audience must be patient with his opening lecture about the provenance and significance of the Loony Tune were about to see, before the feature. He stands in front of the screen as he lectures, in his characteristic twilight wringing his hands with ardor for his subject.

* * * *

End of day. Out on our road, as I drove by in dusk coming home, two vultures were taking turns, pecking in the now-famous little carcass at the roadside. Early dark of winter days. Cold. I use old Squaw submissions as tinder for the stove.
(Something like a “rush hour” is audible these days, from the direction of Highway 49, now that Erikson Lumber has been selling off parcels on its tracts for development.)
On the deck railing, a plate holds rainwater and one bloated pizza crust: Brett’s yeasty homemade pizza dough. Dew on the wheelchair, even this late in the day. Brett reports she thinks Barbara may have had yet another mini-stroke in the art gallery today after I left them: an awkward moment of listlessness. However, she smiles symmetrically. Lifts her two arms symmetrically. Knows who the President is. She’s fine. At 87, as charismatic as ever, if still inconsolably sad.
As I came up the driveway, Cavendish’s truck stood parked in the grass. Cavendish has gone in hospital today for a routine colonoscopy involving anaesthesia. But he is still living primitively out in the river canyon, so has asked if he may convalesce here at our house for one night. It’s a privilege: to serve as a lamp by the side of the road. He arrives, post-colonoscopy, looking debonair as ever, looking as usual like Andrew Jackson on the Twenty. At dinner he is very knowledgeable and informative about polyps, villi and microvilli, lipid metabolism, bile. For Dash’s entertainment, Cavendish has a joke:

Barbara across from him in candlelight, digging her way through her polenta, chuckles grimly to herself and remarks, “Hm. We should’ve thought of that.”

* * * *

In comparison to my solar panels, my clothesline uses photons with maximum efficiency. And with the lowest-tech implements: string and clothespins.
[I continue to indulge these clothesline remarks because the clothesline is such a happy emblem of everything we’re in for. As we’ve, quite justly, exported our so-called “middle class” overseas, we will import a straitened wise frugality from the peasant villages of Mexico and China and Nigeria. This is all for the good. This is all wonderful.]

* * * *

Another sweetheart: Dead salmon lay on its side under two feet of swift clear water, thick-as-my-calf, long-as-my-arm, on the underwater cobbles, its black parchment fishskin fluttering in the current, lifting away in squares, its eye sockets filled with white sauce, its whole surface shivering in the current, fragile from putrefaction

Here is why superstitious practices are fallacious: they are premissed on the notion that I have any desires. Or that is, desires whose consequences I can intend and prefer.
Therein lies the traditional “error” of the astrological chart, the rabbit’s foot, the horseshoe, the burnt offering, the found clover-leaf. The problem is not that superstitions are an “idolatry.” (Such is the childish objection: that one seems to be “worshipping another or false god” – the god of pennies – or the leprechauns.) Rather the good-luck ritual involves the mistake that I might, wisely, want anything at all.

* * * *

ON SUPERSTITION: The Father of the Uncertainty Principle

The physicist Niels Bohr, as an old man, had retired to his cabin on a fjord. But he was sought out by an interviewer. The interviewer asked about the lucky horseshoe nailed over the cabin door. “You’re a scientist. Surely you don’t believe in that stuff.”
Bohr’s actual response. “Oh, no, I don’t believe in it, but that’s the kind of thing that works whether you believe in it or not.”

* * * *

March, 2010.
Got unstuck with my L.A. 1946 novel. Featureless characters finally showed themselves.
The arbitrariness of the process: All I needed to do was be brave and sketch on an eyebrow. Then the one little creature started provoking the others. The eyebrow was what started it.

* * * *

March. Two feet of snow in a single night. Up at 8000 feet they’ll have more than three feet.
Cavendish showed up, in his tall battered truck, and we added to the spaghetti.

* * * *

When, as a young man in the 1960’s, Cavendish left school and “came back West,” it was to come to Relief Hill, a remote inaccessible spot on the Ridge, once a mining encampment, where his family had owned, but at some point sold off, a tract of land with some empty cabins. He and a gang of friends rented those cabins back from the new owners – this is after Woodstock, after the protests, after VISTA in Philadelphia, after Chicago, after cab-driving in NYC. The particular virtue of the Relief Hill place, the thing he’d come back for, was the spring under the live-oak, whose water was sweet and abundant and dependable. Tonight here, by candlelight, taking refuge here from his unheated, snowbound trailer in the unfenced canyon, he boasted that the watercress around that spring was so lush, it was a great bog of watercress as big as this room (swinging an arm). He says some day when the roads are clear he’ll show me Relief Hill.

* * * *

March 23,24. Snow continues.
Buckets of muddy water, to refill the toilet tank. (The electricity at the pumphouse is out.) Nobody’s been to Trader Joe’s lately, so we’ll be getting into the better-than-usual wine. Silently the flakes, big-as-moths, seek earth and stay. Everywhere else, the Dow and the Nasdaq will take care of themselves.

* * * *

Spring, 2010 (SAN FRANCISCO) –
Driving the pickup truck out Lombard toward the GG Bridge and out of town, I’m carrying funereally the last dust of Oakley’s small empire, plaster-chunks, painting debris, rotten splintery lath, carpet tacks, the carpetpad-sponge’s stale toasty-orange dust-crumbs, the whole heap under a lashed-down remnant of carpet. It’s been two years since his death; and Brett and I spent this week working, clearing out his old office in Macondray Lane. Today that little room has two fresh coats of paint, of a shade commercially called linen. Freshly assembled furniture that was purchased by clicking on an “Add-To-My-Cart” button.
The room feels bigger now. One thing you miss about a man when he’s gone for good: everything he knew. (That he knew what a “shibboleth” is; or a decent restaurant in Reno; or Bob Dylan’s real name; that he knew Henry James’s invidious remark about the size of Wharton’s advances; that he knew what an “objective correlative” is; that he knew the point-of-view tricks in Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair,” and Miriam Makeba, and Keith Richards’s solo albums, and the treacherous coast road to Hana; that he knew the clever left-turn strategy off Newport Boulevard; that he knew how to be patient and forgiving.) All of it is gone, gone with him. “Everything he knows” is an element essential to a man, more essential than the heartbeat, or the 98.6 F degrees, or the characteristic smell, or the misshapen old chair, or the Subaru that went to Tracy and lives now in Arizona. Everything a man knows is a quantity hard to enclose. It’s a vanished, immense, galactic genome. Twenty-five boxes of books came out of that cramped room, freckled with mold, histories of San Francisco and the West, accounts of the Mormon migration, cowboy tales, biographies of eminent Californians, the Iliad and Parsifal, John Wesley Powell, “Men to Match My Mountains,” Wallace Stegner, Ambrose Bierce, “Champagne Days of San Francisco,” “Resumés of the Great Operas,” maps of European and Mexican towns, books by his old friends whom nobody would find collectible anymore, gold-rush anecdotes and accounts of the Dakota range-wars, all the scholarship of a serious writer of historicals and westerns. On Lombard Street, afternoon traffic is fast and orderly, and my heavy-laden pickup truck fits into the flow. Near the GG Bridge ramp-up, among motels and tourist-seafood dens, a towering billboard displays a photograph of a baby, a gigantic beautiful infant girl, rosy and alert and warm, with the message (the work of a pro-life group): “HEARTBEAT: THREE WEEKS AFTER CONCEPTION.”

* * * *

April 15, 2:30 am: A late spring frost. The temperature has been sinking all night, while outside, the pear and apple and peach blossoms are at their most vulnerable. This year I pruned and composted them and hung out pheromonal traps for coddling moths with particular care. Now that we have a heavy-duty centrifugal juicer, I’d planned on actually trying to have a big harvest of cider this year.
4:00 am: Found a website at a Michigan State ag school with a chart showing “critical minimum” temperatures for fruit trees at various stages of bud or blossom at risk of frost damage. The lowest among the various categories is 27 degrees. Now already tonight, the temperature has hit 24, and still sinking.

* * * *

In my fifties.
How I’m a hobo. How I practice my so-called “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle, bringing in only occasional trophies, but mostly depend on my wife, her good will in the world, her steady work. Old story: poor boy marries classy girl. Brett’s father was always a good breadwinner (and as for good will in the world, he had a vast network of it). He always had a great-paying job. Barbara never did work. So Brett has no experience of improvident males but yet is patient and forbearing and quite non-judgmental and also (here’s the thing) unfailingly joyful.

* * * *

Have located a hand-crank coffee grinder ($4.50, at a Goodwill in China Basin). Little wooden drawer below with dovetailed joinery. An S-curve in the wrought iron crank handle, with porcelain knob. Not only for power outages, but for the practice of ever-more-perfect Environmentalist Kashrut/Sharia. (In case I ever get serious about that.) (It’s extremely slow in creating its black powder in the drawer.)

* * * *

May 10, 2010

Winter’s gone. Balmy days. Nico and Aleksandra are living in Dash’s old playroom, trying to get a foothold and green-card legitimacy. They’ve displaced Cavendish, who has gone back to his blind. But he’s obliged to come out of the woods every day, dressed and groomed, because he is providing his technical help to an amateur Sondheim production in Grass Valley.
So. Displaced from his bedroom here, what does Cavendish do for his dinners? A Grass Valley supermarket has a “Deli Café” which offers, among the buffalo wings and macaroni salad, two soups du jour, plus chili, in lidded stainless-steel dispensaries. The place also provides wireless internet, so he can labor over his magnificent emails in the evenings. And his appraisal of the chili is: “It’s dependable.” He was sighted this week at one of those Fiberglas-resin picnic-table benches out in front of the place, working at his muddy old Apple Powerbook in the twilight, beside an untouched paper bowl of chili – but dozing over his laptop – his forehead coming to rest at last in the keyboard. At this point Cavendish is approaching seventy, though wiry and tireless, and is pretty-much famous in this town.
Then, yesterday we were having a party here, and he showed up. He carried a supermarket bouquet (awarded to Brett as hostess), and a potted supermarket orchid (for the Mother Superior, Barbara, as it was Mother’s Day) and took sovereignty of his end of the table, full of happy boasting about Sondheim, interviewing his table-mate neighbors in his usual way, condemning as crap the wine we serve here chez Jones and recommending highly, instead, the bottle Sands had brought, making observations about Sondheim’s use of the story structures of fairy tales, even the grisly, gory old chestnuts. The fairy tale, Cavendish says, is all the education we need, as preparation for life. Call kids home from their colleges, retire the liberal arts and sciences, put away the Torah and the catechism and the 3 R’s, and just study fairy tales, squeeze those little turnips for their drops of blood.

* * * *

With Aleksandra here from Krakow, we get a break from my cuisine. Beets and potatoes and cabbage. Bitter rye bread. Mysterious tall ceramic jars with fermenting, souring processes going on. She puts on an apron, ties back her hair.
She immediately took to the garden, too, having arrived at the right moment of spring. On the window sills stand old egg-cartons, each carton containing a dozen dollops of black soil, with sprouts expected, destined to be cucumbers, expected in turn to become pickles.

* * * *

June 6, 2010

A few little teleological observations (occasioned by the wedding, here at home, of Nico and Aleksandra):
We mortals believe that our deeds have (A) discernible origins and (B) discernible consequences. That is, our actions have “causes” in the past and “results” in the future. It’s how we feel anyway. We feel that we are enmeshed in a teleological (cause-effect) net.
But truly, moment-to-moment, our “consciousness” – our intentionality – is in fact a chip tossing in choppy currents, deep oceans, our consciousness just a sequin of reflected light on the surface. Our so-called “reasons” swell and press from outside ourselves. Likewise, the inward “intentions” of our actions are flooded and swamped by creative accident. Many “ad”-ventitious “ac”-cidents were actually born inside ourselves. And grew inside ourselves. We have only a deluded grasp on the causing reasons and caused results of all our deeds. And so we ought to relax. Each of us is an apple hanging on a tree. It’s easy to fulfill one’s appleness.

* * * *

The veg. garden’s elaborate Maginot Line to defend against gophers: galvanized mesh is buried three feet underground, ringing the vegetable garden. However, I seem to have walled in at least one gopher, who now lives there, in gopher heaven, dining on the most succulent roots, fresh ones continually transplanted there for his delectation. Brett takes comic pleasure in this fiasco, while I begin to see real insolvency in all my operations.

Now a plague of drowned mice in the irrigation system. They pop out slick and bloated at the lower gate in system-flush. Or they meet their end as paté grotesque, squashed into sprinkler head, or hose-bib valve.
So I hiked up to the weir and found somebody had left the springbox’s iron lid up. I closed it over and weighted it down with a big stone.

* * * *

Yesterday: a great day. The mysterious irrigation clog has been cleared.
For all the winter months, seeing summer coming, I’d lain awake nights, with Job-like considerations of what would happen to this place without irrigation-district water. (We’ve still got our pumphouse, for drinking and bathing. The irrigation is what’s been broken.)
It was the fire department that unclogged it. Guys from the Coyote Street stationhouse actually came out here, as if they didn’t have anything better to do on a Saturday afternoon [station captain’s response in phone call: “Well, sure, we can be there in ten minutes or so, barring an emergency”], in their big truck, hopping down and setting tire-blocks routinely under the wheels, and they unrolled their 130-psi hose, of grey fabric folded-flat, extending a quarter-mile up the hill, and they blasted the clog uphill along a quarter-mile stretch of pipe, firing brown water out the top end. Then we all stood around and watched while, in the old dry hole in the dirt downhill, clear water welled, and spilled over, and started running downhill in the dust.

* * * *

June 1st
Gutter repair. Replant ruined tomatoes. New tires for Hunter’s car. Spray all buildings’ foundations with Diazinon solution. Start up irrigation to see what leaks. Sort among my kindling-pile like Croesus, restacking it.
Diazinon has been long-since taken off the market by the EPA, but I’m using up this old brown-glass bottle, bequeathed by George and Ginny, from the cabinet in the potting shed. (I just have to keep it nowhere near meadows or gardens.)
(Regret not having sprayed pears and peaches with dormant solution, as now leaf-curl and canker are attacking leaves.)

* * * *

Sands is back from her teaching job, so Cavendish has moved to her place for his pied a terre, in her spare room among stacks of fileboxes. Staying in town saves him the long trip on dirt roads at night, to his deep forest fastness. (At least you’re not sleeping under the Pine Street Bridge, we josh him. Pine Street Bridge is where the orphaned, feral hippie kids from the Ridge sleep.)

Night before last, Sands called from the emergency-room to say she couldn’t come to our little dinner get-together, because Cavendish had showed up at her door in convulsive pain after a closing-show cast party. Had to be driven in there, vomiting, worrying. She had already spent some hours in the waiting room – no doubt editing some client’s novel, manuscript on her knee, cell phone at her side.
Kidney stones were suspected, but he was sent away with a handful of antibiotics and painkillers. Has no insurance, of course. Hasn’t had insurance since he dropped out of Yale forty years ago and went to Woodstock. Was put to bed among Sands’s cardboard fileboxes. Maybe it’s just a urinary-tract infection.
So yesterday I emailed Sands to ask after him. Received this response from her:

He arrived at 6 this morning saying he was almost out of gas (he meant the truck) and didn’t think he’d get home. He’d been striking the “Fantasticks” set all day/night. He’s currently asleep in the guest room. I was awake when he rolled in—he seemed in good spirits.

* * * *

June 13, annual Meadow Party, the music fizzles early, but the food is plentiful, the summer air warm, the little kids rage in the dark woods all night unsupervised, far from the bonfire, with their glowsticks, like goblins. Amy Tan has brought an ipod containing reproductions of birdcalls, and the following morning she has set it up behind the cottage, driving local birds to confusion, sending amplified calls into the trees. David Lukas arrived with large pail full of morels he found around the North Fork of the Yuba. One day later, linguini for twelve, ON MY NEW BRICK FLOOR.

* * * *

June 16, 2010, move to Squaw for the summer.
Snow still in hard drifts at elev 6200ft on mountains’ north slopes. The creek thunders all night long. The paths up the creek are strewn with snowload-felled trees.

* * * *

June 22, 2010

Structure repairs at elev 6200ft. It’s been an unusually stormy Sierra winter. Wrought-iron raillings have been bent under the creep of glacial snow load. Bears, during the depths of winter, have been unseen and unheard-of. A sheet of blown-away plywood lies on our hillside. In the valley meadow: the chickadee’s chirrrrr.
On the house, structural wood after sixty-one years has been shrinking. It starts losing its grip on the old hardware. However, during the same sixty-one years (esp. on the south- and west-facing exterior walls), the beauty of unpainted redwood’s grain intensifies, a red-golden toasty corduroy, a woodgrain big-as-matchsticks, scorched in the grooves, radiant-blushing from the many sunsets it has faced down.
So the good-as-new old brass screws lose their grip in the wood – on, say shutter hinges and door hinges. And I think of Oakley on these summer afternoons as I work, slot-head screwdriver in hand, brown paper bag of shiny new brass screws by my knee. Oakley used to say with a chuckle wherein all mortality and futility are foreseen, “You just keep putting in longer screws.”

* * * *

6-21-10 – My agent calls with good news. Counterpoint Press, hardcover, lead title on spring list. This agent, of lo these twenty years, her patience and forgiveness make me think of some “Higher Power,” or is that just her?

* * * *

Barbara. Her pacemaker operation and her stroke are falling behind her into history, and she shows all the old wit at dinner with old friends. Even a new aloneness in the world is a stole one can wear with a noble bearing.

* * * *

End of June, 2010. Hunter and Nico tear down the old shed on the south side of the upper house. Little pre-fab cedar barn, a kit, purchased no doubt from some hardware store’s parking lot. Crappy two-by-two construction, staple-fastened, the whole structure goes down in a single morning under their blows. Suddenly the view of Granite Chief returns, and Squaw Peak returns, because of course they’ve been there the whole time.

* * * *

That “Just keep putting in longer screws” joke was, on the irony scale, exactly like Oakley’s similar remark about a novelist sustaining his career over the years: “Just lower your standards and keep on going,” he liked to say. (But the irony there isn’t quite as darkly acquainted with the deep full, liberating ocean of futility and mortality. Because I really think he half meant it! So it would have been a kind of despair.)

* * * *

On the topic of the big anti-abortion billboard in SFO proclaiming the heartbeats of embryos. (Which has been on my mind.) ——– It guess it’s an irrelevant consideration (but an interesting fact) that the embryonic heartbeat is, strictly speaking, a half-heartbeat. In utero, only two heart chambers pump blood, not the full complement of four chambers. Until it’s born and takes its first gasp, a fetus’s lungs are collapsed, as is half of the heart. So that little heart is a prototype engine.

(Something pro-life billboard makers perhaps ought to be told, in case it influences their view.)
[Liberal tho’ I am, I find it hard to be entirely unsympathetic to “pro-lifers.” If you really believed that our louche society casually murders unborn babies en masse, then it makes sense that you might be alarmed as we think the average German citizen ought to have been, during the days when people were being removed to death camps systematically, rationally, deliberately, discreetly, hygienically.]

* * * *

Suppose you want to suggest that a fetus isn’t “alive” yet — because it isn’t really human until it’s conscious. Or aware. You want to say that “conscious awareness” is what’s lacking in a fetus. The thing will continue to be only like a sort of unconscious kidney, or abscess, or loaf, until it is “breathed-into” by enlightenment, filled with ideas and perceptions.

Well, if you define the beginning of life as “consciousness” or “awareness,” then the larger question, is: Did Life Ever Begin?

Has It Begun Yet?

* * * *

Who among us (whether born or about-to-be-born) is worthy of preservation, if we accept that “un-consciousness is characteristic of sub-humanity?”
I, for example, personally, travel around inside a blinding, deafening, numbing storm of delusion-solipsism-lust-gluttony-sloth-envy-pride (et cetera). Immediate “Actuality” is something I’m seldom (or, of course, never) in touch with. The Buddhists would say I am in ignorance The old Christians would say I am in sin, as a measure of my distance from Truth.

In any case, I’m not sure I exactly possess “awareness.”

(Human “awareness” and “cognition” might be a merely social phenomenon that accrues, and a semiotic phenomenon, a constant burble, compounded of inward language-rules and outward social conventions.)

* * * *

June in Squaw. The book biz.
Pulled out an old novel from the Annex bookshelves, and wow. The first chapter, at least, announces a great writer: Sara Vogan: her 1981 novel “In Shelley’s Leg.”
According to the jacket copy she was (in 1981) teaching creative writing in Milwaukee.
Only a few pages in, I want to send her a note of admiration – if the rest of the book can carry on like this, there’s another really good novelist in my generation. Or send a note to her agent, to be forwarded.
So I Googled her name. The first two “hits” on Google were, of course, younger, newer Sara Vogans on Facebook, but the third one read: “Sara Vogan, 43, Dies – Novelist and Teacher – Obituary – NyTimes.com”
The dateline on the story was 1991, ten years after In Shelley’s Leg was published. She “was found dead, at her home in San Francisco. There were no immediate survivors.” Cause of death had not been released pending coroner’s toxicology report.

* * * *

Sleepless night. Awake at 3 am, orbiting the lower rooms in my stocking feet, not orbiting near the scotch bottle, which never has been much of a temptation anyway, and doesn’t allay sleeplessness — I bring up on my computer the 24-hr webcam in NYC at 43rd and Broadway. I love this thing, this NYC webcam, and visit it often, mostly at ungodly hours. Watching New Yorkers. In pewter streetlamp glow, they walk past a USA Today dispenser box (some striding, some ambling: it’s six am there).

Ding: in my email stack is another MyLife Search Alert arrives: “I’m looking for Louis Jones,” reads the subject line.
One keeps getting these things, tho’ one belongs to no social networking site. The person searching for Louis Jones, intended to tantalize me, is described in the email as a 28-yr-old female in Flushing, Minnesota.

* * * *

June, 2010.
For Barbara, at her age now, just to get up out of a chair and cross a room is an adventure requiring courage and strategy and resolve, as well as a clear prevision of wreck. I compare her tribulations – pains, embarrassments and inconveniences and darkest perplexity, and the prospect of good-old death always ahead – with ten-year-old Dashiell’s tribulations (we tend to forget the miseries and anguishes of children, for whom the prospect of life looms ahead; which, too, is a “room” to be crossed at peril). And I’m frankly not entirely sure which form of tribulations I’d pick for myself, if I had a choice.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

* * * *

July 18, 2010. Squaw Valley.
Poets are in the valley. Hunter and Zoey, as poetry elves, must wake at 7:15 for Xeroxing. It’s fine to see them, way before their usual rising time, a pair of 19-yr-olds sleepily trudging with coffee-cups to the car.
I’ve ordered two cords of firewood (at inflated mountaintop prices; but they’re full, unstinted cords), which yesterday were dumped off the bed of a truck.

In the afternoon Tad and Andrew and I set up the usual bucket-brigade-style system of transporting it all, by tosses, to the shelter of the deck to be stacked. If you’re the man on the catching end, you have to look lively or you’ll get a log in the belly, or in the back. After an hour of repetitious work, conversation takes on a different pace and protocol. Longer uninterrupted speeches. Longer intervening silences.

* * * *

7-23-2010.
The usual annual party tonight for eighty visiting poetry devotees. Right now it’s two o’clock on a hot afternoon (I am in the cold shade of the basement), and party preparations are stopped till five, by Sands’s decree

In the high Sierra, one may lay out outdoor place settings only partway. During the afternoon, wax candles will slump, and stemmed glasses might possibly set tableclothes on fire by focusing sunlight, burning holes. I saw it happen once. A smoldering at my elbow.

* * * *

The book business transmits Gossip with orgasmic immediacy. For some reason I particularly am entrusted with all such reports whispered with level Schadenfreude, so I find I’ve become, in my 170-lb frame, a treasury of atrocious information about famous or beloved people. I don’t even tell my wife. All the most appalling news of the celebrities, I’m a graveyard for it. The Talmudic tradition: Gossip is murder.

* * * *

2-8-10
Whatever all this is, none of us will ever have the slightest “understanding” of it, though we are in constant uninterrupted contact with all its voltage every instant. Fascinating predicament. Absolutely fascinating.
Coming up from the mailbox in the cold February sun. Lots of heavy, glossy magazines for Barbara. (Or for Barbara’s demographic):

LifeExtension Magazine: Is Your CoQ10 Obsolete?
Increase Mitochondrial Support with a Newly Formulated CoQ10 – Now with Shilajit!

On a telephone pole down the road, an unusual woodpecker (perhaps an intruding species) taps with a rapid rhythm accelerating the decomposition of that particular telephone pole.

* * * *

February 1, 2010

Found some bricks! On the Ridge across the river, the gold-mining enterprises left behind a brick mansion which today is in ruin. Vigorous cedars stand in its center. Bricks can be dug out of the forest soil, to come here and pave a footpath I’m building. Irregular, manufactured on-site in 19th C., fired in Chinese-built kilns at the riverside. Now 100 yrs later, they’re eroded in little loaves, muffin-textured, they’ll be tender under bare feet.
The forgetful, unlettered West. Memory persists in mute artifacts. I built the bookshelves in the mud room out of old three-by-eight timbers from the falling-down barn at the end of Cement Hill Road where the legendary Antonio used to sit and drink red wine, contemplating his one beloved cow, dreaming of Jalisco and Sinaloa. (Whence finally he vanished again.)

* * * *
This week at A.P.P.L.E. (Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy) Neighborhood Readiness workshops are being offered, teaching “easy low-cost ways to package bulk foods in nitrogen at home,” so that when the peak-oil apocalypse arrives, we in the mountains will still eat.

* * * *

Tad’s Stocking-Cap Takes Shape
Brett has been knitting a stocking-cap for Tad. He’s living in Albany, where it’s cold, under the care of his new woman, no doubt chain-smoking, talking brilliantly, happily, at leisure all day every day. (Tho’ his old translation of a Jarry play will be performed! By a puppet theatre-troupe in Albany!)
It turns out the stocking-cap Brett has been knitting was emerging as a Möbius strip. (This can happen easily to an amateur knitter. It happens through an error in the first row.) So she’s going to pull out all her stitches.
But I wish she’d send it to him as it is. Because Tad would get it, and he’d love a Möbius-strip hat, possibly somehow wear it.

* * * *
From the novel:
“Fundamentally everybody always knows everything: it’s a basic working principle of society: everybody knows literally everything and instead there are just layers of self-deception.”

* * * *

January 24, 2010.

With bad weather now upon us, Cavendish seems to be taking up permanent residence. (The plaid fold-out couch in Dash’s playroom, on the NE corner first floor.)
Beside his bed, his scarred muddy laptop and his boxed “household gods”: books and magazines, vegetable oil, flashlight, pancake mix, potato chips, old rusty chrome ratchet-and-socket set, whole-wheat Fig Newtons, duffelbag – all are stacked up before the drawers of Legos, Tinker Toys.

His large, long shoes by the kitchen door, with their associated puddle. His health drink in the fridge. His different (better!) brand of coffee beans. His question at the cupboard Where does this go? His dependable yeomanly contributions of cottage cheese, wine. He makes a trip out for potable water in this power-outage emergency.

I ran into him tonight in town. Before the little David Lindley concert, I’d stopped at a café on Broad Street where Luke and Maggie have a regular dinner-music gig – and there was Cavendish at the counter, wearing heavily swagged scarf and tam-o’-shanter beret. Picture Andrew Jackson in tam-o’-shanter. (Or Samuel Beckett, more like.) He took the stage for a while. It seems to be the season of Robert Burns’s birthday, and Cavendish “Can Sometimes Be Prevailed Upon” to recite Burns’s poems. Which he’s committed to memory and delivers in an astringent Scottish burr.

The “wee sleekit tim’rous cow’rin” mousie made his appearance, and also a fine poem – “An’ a’ that” – about the dignity of the lowly common fellow compared with the transparent tinsel vanity of the superior folk. People, to applaud, put down their knives and forks. He lifts his arms in a harp-shape at the end of a poem, presses one heel into the other foot’s instep.

Much later that night I’m home from the David Lindley show and Cavendish is still up. He says he’s had “a transcendent evening.” Around the corner from the café, they’d all gone to Friar Tucks, he and the musicians. There, he was again prevailed upon to recite (this time the entire long one about the Cutty-sark, which he’s got by heart), and the very old scotch whiskey was brought down and passed around in salute to the great soul Robbie Burns.

(It’s true. There aren’t many great souls that pass among us. Burns was one. Cavendish another.)
Time for bed. Time for Cavendish to go to work on his laptop all nite composing emails. Time for me to join Brett in the cottage, where she’s keeping her mother company. Cavendish says goodnight, but he has to pee first, and heads out the backdoor into the storm. I tell him, “Wait, the power is on. The pump is working. You can use the toilet.” But he says no, he prefers peeing outside. Always has. More environmental.